Dinosaurs!

Have I mentioned I LOVE DINOSAURS! I decided to read the Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Before Dark and of course I had to add in the fact tracker book and before you knew it we had a whole study going with a lapbook of course. We added the Magic Schoolbus Science Kit and movies and more books and it was pretty fun.

This is Skyler with a little printout of the characters in the Treehouse books. She seemed to like it and it held the boys' attention fairly well, they probally got more out of the fact tracker book though. We used the Journey Through Learning Dinosaur Lapbook for this. I also added the book What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs so the kids could get the Christian point of view and Skyler really liked hearing that once upon a time everyone was nice. I added the lapbook pieces from homeschool share that went with that book.  Instead of the whole lapbook with the file folders I used a folder with pockets so they could add all the extras they did.

This is from a How to draw dinosaurs type book from the library.

These are little images of dinosaurs showing certain ones lived during certain times.

We did all the fossil projects from the kit.

They watched online videos of course we found quite a few

They played games

Over all I would say we learned quite a bit about dinosaurs!

Skylers finished folder

Resources Links!

Books
Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Before Dark
Magic Treehouse Dinosaurs Fact Tracker
Magic School Bus Time Of The Dinosaurs
Dinothesaurus  
What Really Happened To The Dinosaurs?

We also checked out a lot of encyclopedia type books to look stuff up

Movies
Magic School Bus The Busasaurus
Magic School Bus Gets Cold Feet

Projects/Printables
Magic School Bus Kit
Journey Through Learning Lapbook
Homeschool Share Dinosaurs  

Websites Games, videos etc.
Dinosaur Called Sue
Dinosaur National Monument
Dinosaurs For Kids
Cool Videos
More Videos
Funschool Dinos
The Dinosaur

So it's summer.....

     This school year is pretty much over, making plans for the new. We are still doing math, handwriting and some spelling. I also decided for whatever reason that we would start reading our way through the Magic Treehouse books. I figure if I toss in the fact tracker books as well it will be good little mini lessons. Right now we are doing book 1 Dinosaurs Before Dark. I have added in some library books and a few other things. We haven't just been doing nothing though. We did take almost all of May off. We made a garden and an eco column though. I will say the garden was hard hot work. The kids had fun I hope. The flowers are starting to bloom, we planted a lot of just stuff. Humming bird, butterfly flowers, and just random stuff my kids picked out.

     Fox had to plant sunflowers and they are really getting big. They had fun making stepping stones as well. 

Skyler did most of the actual making of the eco column. I did all the cutting and drilling of course! She enjoyed digging dirt up for it lol.










Here she is after it is all put together. We had crickets in the top, worms in the middle and the aqua part has snails. Sadly all the snails died within a week. Not quite sure what we did wrong but Skyler had to bury them. The crickets and the worms lived just fine and were released into our yard.

 

I did manage a decent pic of the crickets!

Now for the garden we made.

This was the corner of our house.                      

Pretty yucky! All that overgrown stuff was stickers by the way. It fought us BIG time pulling it all out.

It was NO FUN!

We decided to use tires for planters so we had to scrub them clean before we painted them, my kids have to add some color!

You can tell these were kid created for sure!

 

Well it looks a whole lot cleaner!

They made some concrete stepping stones to go in as well. You cannot have a garden without stepping stones after all.

This is Damians

This is Foxs

Of course this is Skylers she had to cover every surface possible!










This is the garden after the kids had it all set up Ignore my dirty house that is in bad need of a pressure cleaning!

 

 

 

 

This is the garden after some sprouts! The sunflowers in the blue tire to the left are BIG! Fox cannot wait for them to bloom up. I think they have a good job taking care of their plants. For whatever reason the sprouts in the tires in the back have not grown as big. So that is what we have been up to lately. For more pics you can go here. We also added an adorable little rat to the house! Her name is Waffles.

 

 

Week 15

Well the rabbit decided to help out with grammar this week! We did all the normal stuff except science which we need to catch up on. The kids made pictures of the tar and feathering punishment from back in the day.

This was Damians

This is Foxs

Here is Skylers

This is a project from homeschool in the woods. They colored the picture then put tar (glue and black paint) and feathers on it. Except Damian because he didn't want his to be all messy is the way he put it!

Hope everyone else had a great week too.

Week 13

Not much of a post but I took pics!!

Wordless Wednesday

Week 12

Well, our week started out finding our elf in the fridge! We guess he got stuck after trying to sneak leftover pizza! We also celebrated St. Nicholas Day for the very first time ever! I learned about him of course in Catholic School and I have story books about him but never really got into it much. Skyler has been asking lately about Santa Claus and in my heart I know this is most likely the last year she is gonna believe. I know that the time is coming when all the childhood fairy tales will be over and thats just sad for me.

I feel like there shouls have been more, I wanted 6 kids years and years ago. All boys. I never thought Jack or I would be happy with girls we always talked about boys. I used to dream of our boy that would have his eyes and mouth and curls. I love our girls needless to say though. The one like me and the one like him despite what I always thought. I remember our first Christmas with Devlin. We had our first tree and the presents were stacked taller than her. It was amazing. Years and years of stories and Santa Claus stretched out before us.

All the traditions and stuff still yet to happen. Devlin is 15 and her Santa years over now the baby as we call her is drawing near to that too. I wanted her to learn about St. Nicholas though so she would know he was real and the things he did started a tradition that would bring happiness and joy to children for generations. I loved Christmas growing up. My best memory is of me and my mom and big brother decorating our tree. She would tell us about the ornaments. When she made them, where some came from and how old they were.

Whatever stuff we had made in school or whatever would join all the others on that tree like they were becoming part of history. Now those things all hang on my tree and my childrens things join them year after year. It is a huge hodge podge of things many little hands created for so many years. I had so much fun decorating the first tree with Jack for Devlin. I wish we would have had more trees to decorate. I remember picking out the perfect ornaments it was so silly we wanted to get it just perfect for her. It was I think. It was all just wonderful.

So, we celebrated St. Nicholas by a little stocking filled with treats and a juice box and a St. Nicholas story. I placed them under their little personal trees.

I got each of the kids there own little tress last year on clearance. I thought they were adorable. I split the boxes of minature ornaments Jack bought me forever ago that I refused to hang on our trees cause I was always so scared they would get lost. So the first ornaments my children will have will be those that daddy bought! I admit I am very guilty of missing my kids dad at the Holidays especially. Even when we argued it just always felt complete with him around. Of course all we do is argue so that most likely doesn't spread cheer to the kiddos.

In between the decorating and the Christmas past stories we of course did school. Nothing fantastic just school. Skyler is still loving cursive the boys still hate it! They hate writing too and I have realized that will never change.

They also worked on their "newspaper" for history from Homeschool In The Woods Time Travelers. This one is The Town Crier and they wrote about Jamestown and The Thirteen Colonies.

Of course the highlight of the week was decorating!!

Yes all the little tress are beautiful but Foxs looks awesome!!! He really took his time and I love the way it turned out.

Of course my older daughter wanted no pics posted of her and her tree! It looks great though so you all know!  Of course I had to have a little tree too so mine sits in the schoolroom and is decorated with of couse Harry Potter stuff. I had to make it fit in and by the time the kids said I needed a little tree I had already given away all my mini ornaments! So mine is decorated with things printed offline and a little light up toy train that Fox says is the Hogwarts Express at Christmas.

The Golden Snitch tops it off LOL!

We had fun decorating. I hope everyone else had a great week too.

Wordless Wednesday